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I agree with OP, although I'll try not to make my post sound as brutally blunt.

As Marcher has said in the past, IPC itself is not a weak product, it's just badly designed for it's target market, which is people who want a user-friendly and powerful suite.

I also see a lot of people on these forums defend IPC, yet VERY few of them actually have their own examples to back up their claims. I've only ever come across half dozen websites with IPC that actually impressed me.

Even the best programmers here can't make decent websites. The main hurdle seems to be that IPC requires a high amount of skills in programming AND design. Finding people that have skills in both areas is pretty hard. It's even harder to find someone which such skills that also has a passion to build an IPS powered website for a particular niche or demographic.

My 2c at examples given: namenoc
@ csm , sorry but those two websites are not impressive. First is not even IPC is it? Is it just a HTML template you used and removed all copyright from? The second is using default 'dime a dozen' theme and the blocks are badly laid out. The logo is also broken. Poor examples of what we can do with IPC sorry.

@ Dylan Riggs , your site is okay, but your bit of a hypocrite. You defend how easy IPC is to create a website, then say you're too lazy to do it yourself and don't know HTML or CSS. You then call someone else stupid and lazy for not doing what you yourself were too lazy to do. You also advertise website designs in your signature, for $200 or more just for one page. I find this all confusing and can't think of a polite response to it.

@ fadedturbulence , as someone who's only had IPC for a month, I'm not sure whether the short time you've used IPC makes your opinion carry more or less weight. Can you link to your website so we can measure your success? I loved IPC when I first got it too, but after a few months you realize with growing frustration how hard it is to really make something nice and unique. Then you start relying on 3rd party apps that break and lose developer support after several months. It's a never ending struggle.

Hopefully IPS 4.0 will change all this though. They seem to be focusing more on making IPC user-friendly and come pre-shipped with better blocks and sample content (the default blocks are basic, ugly and buggy)

Please consider adding native support for Steam login too. It's the de-facto game platform on PC and I see more and more gaming sites popping up with IP.Board as their 'CMS'. Many gaming orientated forum visitors do not like linking their online alias with their real-world identity (i.e Facebook, Google+, Microsoft or Twitter).

For a community, it would allow start-up sites to leverage an existing (large) member base, which would help them get started. We all hate registering on 101 different forums, many with dubious owners (you know it's not safe to use the same password, so you have to keep track of dozens of different passwords).

Looking very polished, with many great new features I'm looking forward to.

With the Mass PM, will there be any templates to choose from?

This could offer group admins a very easy way to send nice newsletters to their group if they could have some nice HTML templates to choose from (or edit).

Will there be support for group calendars? I read it was on your to-do list months ago but never read anything more about it since. Not much use to me, just curious.

Also, with all the big buttons for editing the group, perhaps they don't need to be visible all the time. A "manage group" toggle button might be more appropriate, because you don't need to modify a group EVERY time you view the page, and these buttons just get in in the way of a nice clean look.

Call me crazy, I'd trust Google over any of them. My family might be more trustworthy, but still less 'secure' (and I'm not married). Lase is still correct, your members are already 'trusting' these providers, so who as forum admin are we to say "no, you can't"?

kenichi, if you're that worried, do more research and educate yourself on Google. You can actually delete and wipe your accounts with Google, including search history, G+, etc. They even have a department called the Data Liberation Front that's sole purpose it to ensure your data can be taken away from Google and moved to other providers, like Apple or Zoho, etc. Go on YouTube and watch some Eric Schmidt interviews if you don't like reading fine print. I don't mean to sound condescending but you should do this for your own education.

Are your 'privacy policies" (not to have a go at you) nothing more than some words you wrote in a forum post? Did you get a lawyer to write them up? When someone on your site is being investigated and the law wants access to your data, do you have the power or money to stand up for your member's rights? Are you an expert in IT security, and have your server and site well guarded against hackers? Do you own the infrastructure and data-center your server is housed in? There's more to trust then a person's good intentions.

As I stated, admins who have a personal distrust of Facebook or Google actually 'think' they are more trustworthy, reliable and secure than these large corporations, but IMHO are doing a dis-service to their own members. If you had 10,000 members, it's likely safe to say at 'least' half have a Facebook or Google account, yet you're telling them they're wrong, and for their own good you're not going to let them trust Facebook/Google with their password for your site, because you can do a better job? :logik:

I'm still just testing IPB 3.3 but it seems they decided to leave OpenID authentication in, but it's there as an installable Log-In method, like Windows Live is.

Probably a good thing, as I expect someone will make some good 3rd party logins for the IPS Marketplace one day that makes it easy to use Google and Steam accounts to login.

Why is it some site owners don't want to 'trust' Google or Facebook for login authentication, but see no problem in forcing all their members to trust them? I'd much rather trust a big 'public' company like Google, with strong security, good set of ethics and defined company policies. In comparison most enthusiast site admins have no policies, accountability or even transparency (and usually uses an alias to remain anonymous). Really.... think about it from your members perspective.

You'll see some forums use an ID at the end of the URL, and some don't. I don't have a copy of xF, but it looks like they give you the option to remove the ID in the URL if you want to (unless you have duplicate names).

We can choose the fURL for Articles starting in IP.C 3.2.3, so it would be good to have this option too with Social Groups 2.0 (using similar method to check for any name conflicts).

So, some kind of IF statement so that when I visit:
www.mydomain.com/groups/programmers
It will check and look for any Social Group name that matches "programmers" and redirect to that fURL.

So, the old structure AFAIK is still standard with IP.B, but things are changing with IP.C and I can only guess this is the future direction fURL's will head across all IPS apps (where applicable).

I run both on my site, and I really can't find any compelling reasons to recommend my members use IP.Blog over Social Groups. There is just nothing I can really think of that IP.Blogs can do that Social Groups 2.0 won't do (and most of it, MUCH better).

Your Social Groups 2.0 will offer better drag-and-drop design, more powerful access control, and generally much more functionality (add/manage your own sub-forums, mass PMs, etc). While IP.Blogs is still useful for writing long blogs, the Social Groups 'News' page offers very similar functionality. I could easily see a "Blog" module made for SG2.0 to make IP.Blog obsolete.

One thing I would REALLY like to see (because I'm very picky about this) is VERY clean fURL structure! Can we get rid of the ID numbers in the URL, or put them at the end (like XenForo)?
I would love to see
domain.com/groups/programmers
domain.com/groups/designers
etc, etc.
Instead of the current structure:
domain.com/groups/show/2-programmers

Multiple forums per group, finally :-P It's all looking good so far. Lots of functionality, without looking too complicated. If you could add a powerful WYSIWYG I can't think of any reason to need IP.Blog over this.

This is exactly what I have been wanting ever since I purchased your Social Groups and IP.Blogs.

I tried to make my own customisable portal page with jQuery and ProtoType but failed at saving it all to the database. You've integrated this beautifully by the looks of it. This v2 of Social Groups will definitely go down well with my members and I can't wait for it to be released.

Very happy IPS changed their decision on locking down the Support Forums. As stated, most of the support was done by peers so it only seems fair past and present licensees are allowed access.

OpenID hasn't been very successful from my experience, but it would be nice if an authentication method was added to replace the removal of one. Login via Steam would be fantastic, unless it's still not possible.

Marcher, here is a screenshot of what I get when I click the Image button using your CKE field.

Here is that the CKE demo looks like:

What is missing is ability to upload a file from PC, or browse the web server files and folders. So if a file is on my PC (eg: I often make screenshots like I just did above) then I still have to use the old method of uploading the file, then attaching it, and it appearing as bbcode in the post window, where I cannot change it's dimensions, add alt and title tags or define CSS styling.

Other than the image button, the advantages I saw in the full CKE editor field were:
Items in bold are ones I would find useful.
However, some features were also lost:
So main reason for me to have used it, was for the image functionality, but too much (important) functionality was lost, and it was still not the fully fledged image editing I was after.
[*] Indent buttons
[*] Table button
[*]Flash button
[*]Insert Page Break button
[*]iFrame button
[*] Heading tags

Wordpress can have news editors and administrators, just like IP.Content. I don't agree with your opinion on the primary difference, as we (IP.Content users) give our staff access to post HTML to create articles on the front-page. Remember, the title of this thread is about "IP.Content" and not "IP.Board", so it's not "any user in the community" that can submit content.

This is the main problem here. The IPB editor is not powerful enough for what many people want to use IPC for (content authors).

If you gave your customers the choice of having an intuitive and powerful editor (like Wordpress) at the risk of allowing their news editors to post malicious content, I bet the VAST majority would accept that risk. Give us the choice, and I think you'll find most will accept it, if it means their content editors will find it easier to write content, and thus contribute more frequently to their sites.